advanced nescience for dummies; intellectual candy for your inner child if you'll just hop into the white van. Sorry Charlie, we want wisdom that's perverse, not perverts who are wise, although we'll probably take what we can get, as will Starkist now that there are no tuna, but that's a digression

Or at least nocturnal-ize ourselves: from the time the school year ends in late May until it begins again at the end of August, 7:00 AM is now 7:00 PM and 7:00 PM is now 7:00 AM. It’s that simple!

Call it Southern Savings Time–why shouldn’t our official time be modified by latitude as well as longitude? It’s clearly different.

And let’s face it–it’s fucking awful out there! Remember, 95 degrees in the shade means 105 degrees in the sun, and that’s 115 degrees on the blacktop, and the blacktop is inexorably spreading everywhere down here. But at night, it’s not so bad–77 degrees, balmy, breezy, and shade everywhere.

Think of the energy savings. Think of the night life. But most importantly, think of the tourist industry–we Floridians could much better fulfill our destiny of entertaining tourists if we just slept during the day and woke up at dinner time.

Because tourists, especially European tourists, love the funky, the different, the off-beat, and nothing could be more funky than an entire society that switches to nocturnal living for three months of the year.

(Well, perhaps “society” is too strong a word–“population aggregate” might be more apt.)

So while not every town can be the city that never sleeps, our cities (again, probably too strong a word–“condensed suburbs” might be more apt) our cities could become just as lively as New York City at the 3:00 in the morning, if only for those three sweaty months when no one is in New York anyway.

And they might just be down here, spending the money that we send up to their wealthy bankers and Wall Street tycoons every time we buy something or crank up our air conditioners.

Few places are so well symbolized by the shape of their geographic borders as Florida, which sticks out from the rest of the continent like a dangling phallus, a penis-insula waving temptingly to vacationers with money and low expectations.

And so we like to have our elections and our criminal trials play out on national and international television. We like to dangle out there.

We’re slaves to bad fashion and we preserve vestiges of all the really awful ones. We still have rat-tails, Farrah hair, man-pouches, and guys who look like Denny Terrio.

And we still have Denny Terrio. Or do we? It’s so hard to tell when he’s not around.

Nationwide criminal pursuits often start or end here. Yeah we bad. And we still use those 80’s expressions.

The celebrities we produce are the kind of celebrities you could have a beer with. And collect reward money too.

Life really is like TV down here in Florida. Good families live like the Brady Bunch or 7th Heaven and bad families can be seen on Lifetime, Court TV, Oprah TV, etc.

Think of us as a filter for California culture. Like a liver.

But you have to remember that all Florida isn’t Florida. There’s Florgia, Floribama, and then there’s Florida. The first two are more like Georgia and Alabama than they are Florida. There’s even a Florissippi, where even though geographically Florida doesn’t border Mississippi, mentally they do.

Be that as it may, the future for Florida looks to be more and more extroverted and exhibitionist as its Latin population explodes with rhythm.

Florida may rejoin the Caribbean as its natural sphere of interaction, but it will always stick out and demand cheap attention.

Old Joke: Why is the St. Johns River in Florida one of the few rivers in the world that flows north?
Because Georgia sucks.
New Twist:
“But the St. Johns empties in Jacksonville, it doesn’t even go into Georgia.”
“I never said they swallowed. You know how Georgia is.”